The White Pilgrim sees the bright patches of firelight surrounding the tables where Arsanc’s followers celebrate the events they expect this night will bring. He cannot be seen in turn where he shifts from shadow to shadow, sees faces he recognizes. He feels them laid out before him in the quickening sight of memory. The farmhouse pyre, the night on the road with the Golden Girl, the song of rage that threads through him that is the memory of the altar at Angarid.
He sees the young sergeant. Gareyth. Dark eyes bright with laughter at the head of his table. The two blades of his rank gleam beneath the sign of the black boar at his arm.
The White Pilgrim watches in silence. He waits, unconscious of the passage of time, of the muscles of his legs locked to hold him crouched low. Unconscious of the weariness he should feel after the open road and the passage along the unseen road. All the things that bring him to this place once more.
All he feels is the heat of the Blade in its scabbard, his hand wrapped tight around the grip. A pulsing force that courses through him like a draught of slow-smoldering fire.
All he sees is Gareyth moving, finally. Staggering to his feet as he shouts with the easy voice of one whose battles are all done. He walks the length of the tables, slaps a dozen hands, returns with vigor the salutes he receives.
The White Pilgrim rises. He drifts through the darkness to shadow Gareyth as he makes his way to the edge of the firelight. An empty space of grey grass and rubble spreads between the Black Duke’s camp and the tents of the dukes he means to rule before this night is done. The young sergeant drifts with faltering steps toward a twisted stand of scrub oak, gaunt branches scraping the night sky. He fumbles with shirt and leggings, whistling as he pisses.
The sergeant’s back is to the darkness, from which he hears a whisper of footsteps across dead ground. He turns back as he finishes. A moment to scan the darkness, to shake off the torpor of wine that shows in the dullness of his eyes.
In those eyes, the White Pilgrim reads the suddenness of the young sergeant’s fear. A stranger behind him. A moment of distraction that no soldier ever allows himself in the field, but the Black Duke’s pavilion is already marked as a site of victory this night. This place is the end and endgame of the lightning-fast invasion of the northern duchies, from which one man will remake a kingdom in his own name.
Then comes a moment of recognition, and the fear fades. Gareyth smiles darkly, appraises the grey face, its gaze as blank as the mist-night that swells around them. No light to betray the Blade held motionless in the White Pilgrim’s hand.
“You are a determined fool…” the sergeant begins, and then he dies.
The darkness swells where the Blade comes up, lances out with all the strength of a lifetime’s rage held quiescent. A rage confined to the shadow of memory for long years. The speed behind its force belies the White Pilgrim’s age, defies the exhaustion that should wrack the hunched figure in the name of all the leagues of his endless road.
Three strikes. The first is through the throat to silence him, but a man might die slow, noisily that way. Not enough. Again, through the spine to drop him, paralyze the pain of nerve and the thrashing madness of the moment of death, by which a man might alert others to his passing even as he falls. And again, through the heart because the Blade’s power demands it. Ankathira the Whitethorn drinking deep of the blood of the unfaithful. Traitors to the cause of the high king.
He hears dead grass whisper in the rising wind. The travel-stained cloak that is the Golden Girl’s is dropped to the body at his feet. The White Pilgrim wears the cloak that Gareyth wore, does not remember donning it. He sees the red band and its black boar, sees the dark stain that mars the steel of the Blade.
Ankathira that is the Whitethorn pulses in his hand with the steady frantic rhythm of the heart that it stills this night. The first blood the Blade draws since Marthai.
The White Pilgrim remembers the madness in his son Astyra’s eyes that is a mirror to the madness in his own. He remembers the mud of the field, blood-black and glistening. The bodies scattered across it swallowed as if by a drowning pool.
He remembers the young sergeant’s face as he turns from the altar at Angarid, moves toward the White Pilgrim lying broken in the shrine. Pity for an old man dying slowly, in agony.
He tries not think on these things.
He bends to adjust the cloak to cover the body. A darker stain in the fog-shrouded shadows, invisible from the pools of light and laughter beyond. As he does, he sees the scabbard at Gareyth’s hip.
He recognizes the hilt. The Golden Girl’s blade that is her father’s. The young sergeant dies with no chance to even reach for it.
The White Pilgrim takes the rapier that is Nàlwyr’s, lashes the scabbard to his waist below the rope belt that now carries the Blade in its scabbard of ivory and gilt leaf. He takes the young sergeant’s purse, covers himself with the dark cloak that is the sign of Arsanc’s guard. He draws the hood up as he slips away.
Toward the main gate of the keep, the White Pilgrim walks with a purpose and detachment that carries him through the shadows between the watchfires of a dozen different camps. He returns salutes where members of Arsanc’s contingent pass him, not acknowledging any face directly. He ignores the dark stares that come from beneath other banners, other badges of loyalty at shoulder and sleeve.
No challenges are made. No one even in Arsanc’s own force looks past the sign of the black boar, the rank marked there. Soldiers’ instincts softened by drink and the more potent elixir of assured victory.
Their master is the most powerful freelord of Norgyr. The newest duke of Gracia. Arsanc will be high king of Gracia by the time the king’s conclave ends. Tonight, perhaps. If not, tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that. Nothing left that might stand in the Black Duke’s way.
Torches and braziers burn bright against the fog at the perimeter of the keep’s curtain wall, its towers rising to their crumbling height of shadow above. It is quiet here. No traffic save for those on the business of the conclave. Knights and lords, foot-couriers under close scrutiny.
The White Pilgrim watches from the ruins of an abandoned stable, scorched stone and timbers cracked and open to the sky like an empty tomb. Two score guards are stationed at temporary shelters where the crumbling gatehouse once stood. Wood and canvas and steel form a bright wall, the old guard posts broken like the stables. All the rubble that is a monument to that day when Mitrost falls.
The gates are closed, the guards stepping forward at their first sight of him, swords drawn. A routine antipathy marks their movements, focusing on the lateness of the night, the dark importance of the business unfolding within the keep’s walls. The same knife-edge of open antagonism in them as that seen between the factions outside the city wall. The warriors of lesser dukes, staking out their claim to Arsanc’s service while they can.
“Speak your business at the king’s seat at Mitrost,” the closest guard says in Gracian, “and swear your fealty and liege to Gracia.”
The old oath, or an approximation of it. He hears it uttered countless times, long ago.
“Arsanc,” the White Pilgrim says simply. He hunkers down in his stolen cloak, lets his gaze drift face to face. He feels an anger thread through him. The voice of Whitethorn unspools shadow as it whispers, sends his gaze across the closest guards. His hand strays to the hilt of the Blade beneath his cloak.
He fights to clear his vision, forces his hand away from the scabbard and into the sleeve of his unseen robes. When he brings it out, it holds the token of the Black Duke, pale gold gleaming in the swirl of mist and torchlight from high along the walls.
“Arsanc,” he says again. He sees eyes slip from the token to the sign of the black boar at his shoulder.
Grudgingly, the guards step back, swords lowered as a knock is hammered out at the gates. The scraping of bar and bolt, a flare of firelight and evenlamp. The brighter light of magic slips into the fog like white fingers, the gates swinging wide. Another six guards s
tand within, their dark looks joining with the looks of those outside as the White Pilgrim passes them.
He walks down a wide hall, floor set with flagstones that were white once, long ago. They spread splintered now, ground grey with dirt and ash. He hears the gate crash shut behind him. Hears the murmur of voices fall and fade as he passes by empty alcoves, walls lined with the cracked shadows of shattered mosaic and relief.
Within a great circular courtyard, four staircases climb. Pillars circle around him like advancing giants wrapped in white. The open air above shows a wash of stars, the sky pale in the west where the Clearmoon wanes. A blood-red haze to the east shows where the Darkmoon climbs.
He feels the last fragments of the scales of time fall from his eyes. He gazes out upon the ruin that is his legacy.
Long years ago, Mitrost is the White City and the keep is its gold and silver heart. A castle-town within a city. Home to five thousand of the high king’s closest companions and servants, mages and scholars who are the backbone of a reign built on visions of greatness. Now, those long years leave barren shadows in their wake. Apartments and markets, emporiums and barracks are long gone. Only carcass stones remain, as fragile in appearance as the wall of wind-shivered bark that lingers when the great oak is eaten away by rot from within.
These crumbling foundations are still strong enough to support the battlements and halls that are the heart and height of the keep. Firelight burns bright there this night, in the domed hall where the white table stands shattered. The king’s conclave is there. Deciding the fate of all that Gracia lost in the tale Gilvaleus tried and failed to write.
The White Pilgrim hears voices in the distance from two directions. Heavy steel footsteps. Guards on patrol, at least as many as those that watch at the gate by his guess. He tarries too long.
Cursing memory and vanity, he slips past the closest pillars and into the shadow of a passageway. This twists within the north quarter of the keep, largest of the four wings set off from the circular courtyard. He watches the guards pass, sees not the mix of uniforms and sigils of the gate but a singular slash of red on all the dark cloaks. Arsanc’s troops, patrolling out from where their master holds court in the domed hall above.
He feels the routes he must take there, locked into a memory untouched now by age or shadow. He knows the way he must walk before this ends.
He knows it is time.
He moves by instinct, taking back staircases and forgotten passageways rank with mold and shadow. He listens for footsteps ahead and behind, shifts all but silent around them. An unseen shade in his cloak of black. Bare feet a whisper across the rubble that dusts the ancient marble of empty corridors, the crumbling stairs he climbs.
From the darkness ahead, he catches the sweet scent of rot and age, and he is there.
When Aelathar comes to him, her power is the old magic of the druidas, and so a garden he promises to make for her at Mitrost. With walls of glass and shimmer-glowing gold, it opens up beyond the domed hall and the king’s seat, and from that throne of state, he watches her distant figure walk paths of white gravel in the company of doves and summer moths.
He clambers over a wall of white stone that glimmers silver in the starlight. He pushes through a shroud of grey boughs and bearded moss. The low walls of the garden are crumbling in the embrace of ivy and decay. The regular ranks of smooth-barked peach and apricot and plum that once marched here spindle to intermittent stands now, splaying moss-crusted fingers to the air.
He watches two guards walking the near edge of the darkness, easily times his movement between them. He knows that more lurk within the light that seethes in the distance, the glow of fires and evenlamps bright beyond a twisting wall of mist and shadow. He knows that they do not matter to him yet.
The trees are ranked like dark sentinels, but he holds the allegiance of the night as he slips through them, bare feet silent across loam and leaf fall. The haze of light swells, and through mist and distance gleams a weaver’s loom of glittering shards that he knows marks the shattered windows that are the garden’s edge. The lost entrance to the domed hall where the future is made.
He feels Arsanc there without needing the power of the Blade to see. The eighteen other dukes of Gracia are with him. The best warriors of two nations and nineteen armies, but they do not matter to him yet.
Through the mist, he sees a lone pavilion set amid the trees. The banner of the black boar hangs unmoving in the chill air.
Two more guards pace out slow movement that he reads with ease. He draws on the power of the Blade, acknowledges its hunger as its sight shows him the unseen spaces within the mist-shrouded tents. Shows him the empty shadows he walks through as he finds the single tent he seeks. Shows him the spot away from the light where the darkness hides him, lets him cut his way through and into the deeper darkness beyond.
They keep her in darkness for the terror that the darkness brings. The pain she suffers scars her thought, so that the mind left alone feeds on itself. Creating terrors more potent than anything that can be visited by the world outside the mind.
The scent of filth and fear. A faint line of grey light at the main spar of the tent marks an evenlamp shrouded with black cloth. The White Pilgrim frees one edge of the glowing crystal sphere, just enough to set the interior of the pavilion as a silver haze. Enough to show him a rough table and stools, a brazier burned low, blankets piled haphazardly.
He hears the catch of her breathing in the dark. He follows the fear to the corner where the Golden Girl lies.
She is opposite the sealed flaps of the doors. He crouches so that he can listen, can watch for any sign of approach even as he knows that no one will enter. She is Arsanc’s prize, and none among the Black Duke’s forces will dare to sully his vengeance. A thing that their duke seeks since before the Golden Girl is even born. The girl he destroys, will destroy, in the name of that vengeance.
She is bound hand and foot, eyes shut tight where she curls in the corner. A blanket of rough homespun is slipped off her, covers only her legs. The chain shirt of dwyrsilver that is her father’s is worn against her bare flesh. No doublet or shirt beneath it. He sees where it rubs her raw, her broken body anointed with the armor that is the sign of her conviction and purpose. Returned to her as some kind of mocking trophy.
He sees the bruises that color her face, her arms and back. Sees dried blood streaking her cheek, her shoulder, her belly.
The White Pilgrim shifts closer in the red haze of his sight. He fights to keep his hands from trembling as he reaches for her. Closer, and he sees that her eyes are open, faint slits of shadowed steel-blue that gauge his movement. Close enough that she can spit through cracked lips to catch the black boar at his shoulder, can swing her legs around, driving them for his stomach like a ram.
He stops her, gently. Pulls the hood of the cloak back so that she can see his face.
The sight of the Blade courses through him. It fills him with her pain in a searing instant of understanding, and in that sight, he realizes how young she truly is. Understands how much of her strength is the mask of her father that she wears. He sees the world through the blue eyes that cleave all life, all things, cleanly into light and dark, right and wrong.
The Blade lets him see himself through her eyes, only for a moment, so that he can see the horror in himself. The pain and remorse that is the sight of her. The coldness in his gaze that is the hunger for vengeance that is all he knows now.
No words pass between them. He grasps her hands to quell their shaking as he unties the cords that bind her. She wraps herself in the blanket, shifts close to the brazier for the last of its heat. From within his cloak, the White Pilgrim retrieves the bundle he took from the children’s tent. Clothing, boots, a jacket. Sized for the boy leader, all too large for her, but it will do.
She dresses in silence, hands shaking as she slips the chain shirt back on over a dirt-streaked tunic. She covers it with the jacket, sets her mouth with the pain of each movement. The slee
ves of the jacket, she leaves long. Covering the red welts of ropes at her wrists.
From beneath his cloak, the White Pilgrim retrieves the sword that is the weapon of the Golden Girl’s father. He hands it to her with head bowed but she barely looks to it.
“The king’s sword,” she whispers, voice cracked like old stone. “Where is the king’s sword?”
“It is safe,” the White Pilgrim says. “You must go to Angarid.” He opens the purse that is the sergeant Gareyth’s. Copper, silver, and gold gleam faint within as he slips it to her hands. “Take the farm tracks. Pay your way with copper, keep the rest hidden. The healers will have returned to the shrine by the time you make your way there. Let them care for your hurts. Let them keep you safe.”
“Where is the sword of kings?” she cries, and the pain in that voice threads through the deep sight he feels to bring back the old ache of his heart. Cutting him with all her fear, and all the longing of her quest. “I left it for you. You must…”
“A king’s subject does as she is ordered,” he says. He finds the old voice, sees the force of it reckoned in her weeping eyes. “A king’s companion does her liege’s will with honor,” he says, more gently, but the grief as she looks away cuts deep through the Blade’s sight.
In the end, he cannot bear that pain. Cannot stop his hand as it flips his cloak aside, reveals the ivory scabbard slung there. The White Pilgrim sees a light return to the blue eyes. He sees a hope there that he does not recognize anymore.
He takes her hands in his. Draws her to the dark back of the tent and the entrance he makes there. The sight of the Blade shows him the silence beyond, lets them slip safely out and through.
The Golden Girl’s hand is in his as he draws her quickly through shadow and shrouding branches, leads her to the wall of white stone. He senses the movements of the distracted guards in the darkness around him, pacing his approach to their silence.
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Page 37